“What’s the kid’s real name?”
He shrugged. “Dracula’s all I know him by.”
“Know where he hangs out?”
“Sleeps above the blood joint, I heard.”
“Where is it?”
He pointed. “Up by the Self-Help Center.”
I spent some time trying to decide what it meant or if it meant anything. When I couldn’t see significance in any direction, I returned to the business that had brought me there. “I take it Nicholas Crandall was a regular around here.”
“I wouldn’t say anything about that guy was regular. But yeah, he came in pretty often till I eighty-sixed him. His girl, Jan, cleans up three mornings a week, before we open.” He looked at the papers on the bar for the umpteenth time. “That a warrant?”
I shook my head. “Notice of Heirship.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Nicholas Crandall has inherited some money.”
“Yeah?” He stopped wiping the glass, looked at it with justifiable skepticism, then took it to a tub of soapy water and drowned it. “How much money?” he asked when he got back.
“That’s confidential.”
“Inherited from who?”
“His brother.”
“Tom?”
I glanced at the paper as though I’d never heard the name before. “Thomas Crandall. Right.”
“I heard he died. A shame, as a matter of fact.”
“You knew the deceased?”
“He’s been in a few times. Usually looking for Nick. Or Jan, which is the same thing.”
“Tell me more about Jan.”
The bartender shook his head. “Life’s a goddammed card trick, you know? I mean, there’s Nick—goofy as anyone who ever walked—and he ends up with a broad like Jan. I mean, she’s a little bent herself, but still—makes me half-hard every time she wrings out the mop, boobs roll around in her shirt like apples in a sack.” He laughed less in lust than in awe. “The rest of the day is downhill, let me tell you. But she wouldn’t let me lick her clit if I was dying in the desert. Saves it all for Nick.”
“Any chance she’ll be in this afternoon?”
He shrugged. “If Nick’s on one of his missions, she’ll probably look in to see if he’s back. But maybe not; after the TV thing I told him I’d deck him if he as much as peeked in the window.” He glanced to his left; what he saw made him issue an amendment. “Not that I could tell if he did.”
“Does Nick live close by?”
The bartender started to say something, then stopped and crossed his arms. “What’s in it for me if I know?”
I looked at the fifty. “The change.” I looked at the notice. “Plus however grateful Mr. Crandall might decide to be when I tell him you helped me get in touch with him about the inheritance.”
The barman glanced around the bar, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t rat on my regulars.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean, privacy is privacy. It’s kind of my stock-in-trade.”
“Mine, too.”
“But there’s money in this, right? I mean for Nick.”
“Right.”
“So that means—” A thought suddenly disturbed him. “’Course, you might be lying.”
I shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”
“Most people who come in hunting someone are lying.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“So how do I know you’re not?”
I smiled. “You don’t.”
He tugged the towel tighter around his waist, then picked up the notice and looked it over; I think he even read it. “Hell, this is legit; got to be. I mean, you couldn’t fake something like that. Right?”
“Right.”
“And my TV got busted all to hell, so it’s not like I don’t deserve some … repar … whatever you call it.”
“Reparations. Recompense. Remuneration.”
“Yeah. Right. All that. So what the hell. Him and Jan crash in a flop on Turk. Above the sex shop with the neon tits out front.”
TWENTY-TWO
The bus terminal at the corner of Taylor and Ellis was terminally abandoned: overgrown with weeds, littered with trash, smudged with graffiti, posted with NO TRESPASSING signs, ringed with a cyclone fence in an ineffective effort to keep transients from establishing residency. In its heyday, it had been the downtown terminal of the airport bus line, the place where people who didn’t want to spring for cab fare were taken when they opted for mass transit instead. But the airlines and the chamber of commerce finally realized it wasn’t a boost for tourism to dump visitors to the city in the middle of what amounted to a free-fire zone, and the tourists were given other options. I walked the fenced perimeter until I found a way through it, then scuffed around in the debris and the dust inside the terminal, remembering Tom, thinking about Ellen, trying to make sense of something that seemed increasingly to have madness at its core.
I’d dealt with insanity several times in my work—most dramatically a few years back when I’d confronted a guy called the Maniac who’d been a Pied Piper of psychosis over in Berkeley for a while—but despite or maybe because of my experience I am and always will be afraid of mental aberration. Although Tom Crandall had been the mildest, perhaps even the sanest, of men, his murder had taken me into the depths of the Tenderloin, which is to say into a crucible of derangement. As I watched the flow of people up and down the street, some more normal than I, some tied to reality by the slenderest of threads, most on their way to Glide Memorial for a free meal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that madness would erupt in a violent and definitive way before Tom Crandall’s story was fully written.
The apartment on Turk was just as the bartender described, a crib on top of a smut shop that called itself Pluto’s Porn Palace. When I got there, the shop was doing a brisk business, though mostly in the form of browsers—I doubt there was a magazine in the place that hadn’t been thumbed through by someone and slavered over by someone else and, most likely, become destined to be shoplifted by yet another connoisseur.
The proprietor glanced up when I asked him how to get to the apartment upstairs, pointed down the street to the left, and went back to what he was doing, which seemed to be fitting a blue French tickler over a pink plastic penis of what I hoped was more than life size. I regarded it as an achievement that he didn’t try to sell it to me.
The door to Pluto’s left had the number 52 hand-painted on it. There was a metal security screen across the entrance, but the lock had been jimmied so many times the iron around it could have served as a sponge; when I gave the grate a shove, the only resistance was inertia. The door to the building was similarly vulnerable.
Inside, the stairwell was dark and dank. The mailboxes along one wall looked regularly pillaged. Fumes of urine and cheap wine combined in their usual compelling fragrance, and the steps were littered with the usual postmodern trash—condoms and beer cans, syringes and Styrofoam, liquor bottles and burger boxes, and lumpy tubes of excrement both animal and human. The sole bit of flair was a tattered edition of one of the publications featured next door—this one was called Big Boobs. Buoyed by the minimalist simplicity of the title, I waded through the slush, keeping my hands in my pockets and my eyes on the steps, and climbed toward the second floor.
As it turned out, Nicky Crandall’s apartment was easy to spot—halfway down the hall, a bright white doorway loomed out of the gloom as dramatically as the prow of the Dutchman’s ship. When I was still ten feet away, I could read the names—Nick and Jan—which had been painted on its surface in bright orange letters with the same sentiment that makes people carve initials into trees. The door was the only clean surface in the place, a distinction that could have only been maintained by fierce devotion. The acolyte must have been Jan; the elegance of the effort made me eager to make her acquaintance.
I knocked twice, then twice more. Something creaked, then scraped, then groaned. Then something else approache
d the door.
“Nicholas?” The voice was delicate but assertive, simultaneously eager and afraid.
I didn’t respond.
“Nick? Is that you, babe?… Nick?”
I mumbled something indecipherable, something I hoped would help me pass for the person I’d been taught to believe that Nicky was. The response was immediate and insistent.
“Run, Nick! Run! They’re waiting for you. Don’t let them get—”
The warning was stifled in midword. A moment later, sounds of moaning were accompanied by a series of muffled thuds. After a moment of leaden silence, I heard someone struggling with the dead bolt.
The snow-white door burst open, and a man dashed into the hallway. In white uniform with red trim, he looked like a soda jerk more than a burglar. The word “Healthways” was stitched at the breast and back, but his eyes were more suited to mayhem than either medicine or malteds.
He looked at me, and I looked at him. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. His sharp features suggested both competence and cruelty.
I pointed down the hall. “Apartment twelve.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He looked right and left. “You see anyone out here just now?”
I shrugged. “Only Nicky.”
He looked at me again. “Where’d he go?”
I pointed toward the stairway.
The man gave me another look, as if something would crawl across my face and tell him if I was lying, then went back inside the apartment without closing the door. “Let her go,” I heard him say. “Come on, Ron; we got to catch him.” And finally, “We got no time for that shit; come on.”
The first guy and a second who was his twin in all but size and hair color ran into the hallway and headed for the stairs. I waited till they were out of sight, listened to their descending footfalls, then looked back at the apartment they’d exited in time to see the white door begin to close.
Before it latched, I used a foot to stop it. “Get out of here,” a voice, girlish but determined, screamed at me. “I’m going to call the cops if you don’t leave. I mean it.”
“I’m not them,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m not from Healthways.”
The pressure against my foot diminished. A few seconds later, the door opened enough to let a single blue eye assess me. “Who are you?” the voice asked.
“My name’s Tanner.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find Nicky Crandall.”
Her laugh was dry as sand. “You and everyone else in the world.”
“I need to talk to him as soon as possible,” I said.
“What about?”
“His brother.”
“Tom?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you talk to Tom himself?”
Which was my second surprise of the afternoon. Apparently Jan, if it was Jan, didn’t know of Tom’s demise. I wondered if Nicky was similarly ignorant, assuming Nicky was still alive.
I asked her her name, to clear up at least one thing. “Jan,” she said with pride. “What about it?”
“It would be easier to explain if you let me in.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had enough company for one day.”
“So I noticed. I was hoping I’d get credit for faking them out.”
She hesitated. “Was Nick really out there before?”
I shook my head. “I fibbed.”
She hesitated again. “Wait a minute.”
Her eye left the door but returned seconds later. “The ambulance is gone; I guess you’re okay.”
She opened the door. The face that looked at me in frank appraisal was tight and drawn, pallid and afraid, thin and anemic, yet close to lovely all the same. Blond hair spilled down her forehead like strings of overcooked pasta until it was brushed away by a surprisingly swarthy hand. Her wary eyes were sky-blue pinpoints above cheekbones that were as sharp and white as artifacts. Beyond the caution and exhaustion, her eyes held a store of strength that seemed to be on call.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded. Her lips were dry and barely pink; when she spoke, they moved only occasionally. The top button on her blouse dangled from a loose thread, presumably courtesy of Healthways.
“Who are you again?” she asked wearily.
“Tanner.”
“So what’s the program? Did Tom tout you onto Nick about something?” She smiled at a private joke. “Are you here to straighten him out?”
I shook my head.
She looked at me more closely, as if she hoped I came with a warning label. “You’re not a cop, are you? You look like a cop. Or a father,” she added, her voice as flat as a cabbie’s.
“Neither.”
“You from West Side Mental Health?”
I shook my head and tried to take control of the situation. “What were the Healthways guys doing here?”
“The usual—looking for Nick.”
“What did they want with him?”
Her shrug was more casual than the incident warranted. “They claimed Dr. Marlin sent them.”
“So Marlin is still treating Nick.”
She shrugged once more, as though treating Nick were an abstraction. “I guess. Lately he just sends the ambulance around.”
“Why?”
“So they can give him tests and stuff, supposedly. To make sure the medication’s working.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“I guess.” Her eyes flattened, and her voice grew heavy. “Nick thinks it’s a conspiracy, though, so maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it.”
“Whose word should I take?”
The question was difficult for her to answer. “Maybe you should just ask Healthways.”
“I probably will,” I said, then looked around the apartment. “When’s the last time you saw Nick?” I asked when I didn’t see any sign of him.
“Yesterday.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? He lives here.”
Her response came as a relief—Tom’s fear of his brother’s demise seemed to be unfounded. “Do you know where I can find him?” I asked her.
Her lips stiffened. “Do you know Nick?”
“No.”
“Well, if you did, you’d know that once Nick goes out that door, no one on God’s green earth knows where he’s going. Not even Nick.”
“He’s that bad?”
The energy beyond her eyes surged to the foreground. “I didn’t say he was bad; I just said he was unpredictable.”
“Even when he’s on medication?”
Something in my tone made her look turn arch. “Hell, mister, down here we’re all on medication—how else do you think we could stand it?”
“Does that include you?”
Her look dared me to believe she was different from the rest of the denizens. “What do you think?”
“You look pretty squared away to me.”
Her lip curled. “I’m on Prozac. It’s very hip, if you don’t know—Daddy pays a fortune to the shrink who writes my scrip.” She paused and looked around, as though aware of her marginal surroundings for the first time. “I’m doing okay, most days.” She thrust out her arms. “The last time I went off it, I did this.”
The scars on her wrists shone as brightly as silver bracelets; the sheen in her eyes indicated the deeper wounds still hadn’t healed.
“Nick got me to the clinic before I phased all the way out,” she continued with pride. “He was really there for me.”
It was the first good word I’d ever heard about him. “Have you been with Nick long?” I asked.
“Five years. I don’t know if that’s long or short.”
“Long, I’d say.”
“Yeah. I think so, too. Sometimes it seems real long—we’ve been on the road a lot.” She blinked back the trend toward a rocky reminiscence. “What do you want with Nicky, Mr. Tan
ner?”
“To talk to him about his brother.”
“Like, what do you want to know?” she asked a shade defensively. “Tom didn’t come by this week, so if he’s in some kind of trouble, Nick won’t know anything about it.” The subject galvanized her. “The next time you talk to him, tell him to try not to miss again. Nick gets all agitated when Tom doesn’t visit. He takes it personally, you know?—claims Tom has gone over to the Other Side and stuff; I hear about it for days. If Tom could just get a message to us when he can’t make it, maybe Nick wouldn’t get so worked up.”
“I’m afraid you don’t understand. It’s not Tom who—”
Riding a manic roll, she didn’t let me finish. “But he’ll come this Sunday for sure—he never misses two weeks in a row. So why don’t you come by Sunday morning? I’ll make pancakes. Nick almost always stays around on Sundays—he likes Charles Kuralt. He thinks the Other Side is after him, too.”
“Who’s this ‘Other Side’ you keep referring to?”
She shrugged. “Nick says people are watching him. Keeping track of where he goes and what he does so they can poison him. It’s why he leaves before sunup, so he can give them the slip.” She got a strange look on her face, as though she realized that what she was saying might be regarded as odd in some quarters. “They take Sundays off, Nick says. That’s why he can stay home that day.”
“Do you believe someone really is after him?”
She took the question seriously. “They were just here, right? I mean, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
She didn’t seem to realize she’d paraphrased an old joke. “Has anyone but the Healthways guys come looking for Nicky lately?”
She thought about it. “Only Dracula.”
“What did he want?”
“The same thing he wants from everyone—blood. I tell him he’s wasting his time, but …” She shrugged away the issue.
I gestured toward the room behind her. “Can I look around for a minute?”
For some reason, the request worried her. “Do you have to? Nick doesn’t like people messing with his things.”
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